Albic

Albic
Spoken in:	British Isles and elsewhere
Timeline/Universe:	League of Lost Languages
Total speakers:	--
Genealogical classification:	Albic  Proto-Albic(†)  South Albic   Old Albic(†)   Low Elvish   Macaronesian  North Albic   Caledonian   Alfheimian(†)  West Albic   Iverinian   Borgarnesian(†)
Created by:
Jörg Rhiemeier	2000-

The Albic language family constitutes the main conlanging project of Jörg Rhiemeier. It is a family of languages spoken in the British Isles and the Canary Islands (and a few other places where British Elves settled) in the League of Lost Languages. The name "Albic" is from the Old Albic self-designation Alba. Old Albic was the dominant language of Britain before the immigration of the Celts; its speakers, the British Elves, were the bearers of a unique ancient civilization which gave rise to the Celtic and Germanic traditions of Elves, the Greek tradition of Hyperborea and possibly also of the Atlantis myth. They were essentially humans who behaved pretty much like the Elves of J. R. R. Tolkien (whose languages were influential on the creation of the Albic languages). The modern Albic languages (Low Elvish, Caledonian, Iverinian and Macaronesian) are spoken by tiny minorities; they descend from various vernacular dialects of Old Albic.

Three branches of the Albic family can be distiguished: South Albic, consisting of Classical Old Albic, Low Elvish and Macaronesian; North Albic, represented by Caledonian; and West Albic, to which belongs Iverinian. These three branches evidently already existed as dialectal divisions in classical times, with Classical Old Albic showing characteristic features of the South Albic branch.

The Albic languages seem to be distantly related to Indo-European (see Europic) and share a number of features (such as VSO word order and initial mutations) with the Celtic languages of the British Isles as well as with the Coric family; these three families thus form a linguistic area (see this article for details). The Albic languages are active-stative languages of the fluid-S subtype; other interesting features include autosegmental behaviour of vowel features (leading to various umlaut and vowel harmony phenomena), marking of degrees of volition by various noun cases, suffixaufnahme (i.e., possessors agree with the possessee in number and case in addition to their own number and case marking), and a duodecimal (base 12) number system.

The Albic languages

• Proto-Albic (reconstructed, Britain)
• South Albic

• Old Albic (classical, Britain)
• Low Elvish (modern, southwestern Britain)
• Macaronesian (modern, Macaronesian islands)

• North Albic

• Caledonian (modern, Scotland)
• Alfheimian (extinct, Sweden)

• West Albic

• Iverinian (modern, Ireland)
• Borgarnesian (extinct, Iceland)